NASA’s plans to return to the moon take a hit

By Katie Hunt, CNN

(CNN) — Humans landed on the moon during NASA’s Apollo program in the late 1960s and 1970s using computers that had far less processing power than today’s smartphones.

Still, even five decades later, landing on the moon is far from easy.

Several notable missions over the past few years have proven that point: Israel’s Beresheet spacecraft crashed into the ancient lunar volcanic field called the Sea of Serenity in 2019, and last year, Russia’s Luna-25 mission and a commercial Japanese lander called Hakuto-R both smashed into the moon’s surface. (India, however, celebrated becoming the fourth country to land a spacecraft on the moon.)

Successful or not, the efforts are part of a new space race in which the push for lunar exploration has taken center stage. Several projects are expected to head toward the moon this year with sights set on a soft landing.

The first to take flight — a commercial mission out of the United States — hasn’t gone as planned.

Explorations

Astrobotic Technology, the Pittsburgh-based company that — under a $108 million contract with NASA — developed the first US lunar lander to launch in five decades, has abandoned plans to attempt a soft landing for its Peregrine Mission One on the moon.

The spacecraft successfully lifted off Monday atop a Vulcan Centaur rocket, a new vehicle developed by United Launch Alliance that was on its inaugural flight. Soon after, Peregrine suffered “critical” propellant loss from a fuel leak, which means a controlled moon landing, originally slated for February 23, is off the table, according to Astrobotic.

NASA had hoped that Peregrine 1 would notch an early success for its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, aimed to drive down the cost of building a lunar lander — particularly as the space agency is facing lengthy delays in returning astronauts to the moon.

Discoveries

Northern Europeans are among those most prone to the debilitating autoimmune disease multiple sclerosis, and a new study based on DNA recovered from ancient bones and teeth has offered clues as to why.

A comparison of more than 1,000 ancient genomes, collated as part of a new database, found a link between multiple sclerosis risk and shared ancestry with a Bronze Age group of nomadic herders known as the Yamnaya.

Researchers believe these nomads, who hailed from the central European steppe, move westward and introduced a genetic variant that once offered protection against infectious pathogens carried by domesticated animals but evolved to affect modern disease in a very different way.

Dig this

What led to the demise of the largest apes that ever lived?

New research published this week has shed more light on the mystery of why Gigantopithecus blacki — a type of primate sometimes called the real King Kong because it stood almost 10 feet (3 meters) tall — disappeared.

Paleontologists analyzed and dated fossils and sediment from the caves where the animals’ remains have been found to understand how their diet and the environment in which the creatures lived changed over time, narrowing down a likely time frame and a reason for the species’ extinction.

Gigantopithecus was discovered in 1935 after paleontologist G.H.R. von Koenigswald found large teeth being sold as “dragon bones” in a traditional medicine shop in Hong Kong.

Across the universe

The first fast radio burst, or FRB, was discovered in 2007, and since then, scientists have detected hundreds of intense, millisecond-long bursts of radio waves coming from distant points across the universe.

Much about these quick, cosmic flashes and their origins is still unknown. But now astronomers have traced one of the most powerful and distant fast radio bursts ever detected back to its unusual cosmic home: a rare “blob-like” group of galaxies.

The unexpected discovery could offer insight into what causes the mysterious radio wave bursts, a question that has puzzled scientists for years.

Once upon a planet

The world’s oldest known fossilized skin belonged to a species of reptile that lived before dinosaurs roamed Earth.

With a pebbled surface that resembles crocodile scales, the skin fragment is more than 289 million years old — at least 130 million years more ancient than what was previously the oldest known skin fossil, according to a new study that published Thursday.

Skin and other types of soft tissue rarely become fossilized, as these decay much more easily than bone.

But researchers at the University of Toronto Mississauga believe that this sample was preserved due to unique features of its location: the Richards Spur limestone cave system in Oklahoma, where many of the oldest examples of early terrestrial animals have been found.

Curiosities

Take note of these remarkable stories:

— China, in partnership with the European Space Agency and other institutions, has launched a probe that will hunt for X-ray bursts from black holes and other high-energy space phenomena.

— Despite mounting concern from scientists and environmentalists, Norway might become the first country to allow deep sea mining.

— A 106-year-old, three-masted sailing ship is on a two-year journey retracing the pivotal voyage made by British naturalist Charles Darwin that did much to inspire his theory of evolution.

— An older and equally sizable relative of T. rex has been newly identified in New Mexico, according to researchers.

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